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17. The Kiapo Fair
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in El Filibusterismo, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism and Identity
Violence vs. Nonviolence
Education and Freedom
Hypocrisy and Colonial Oppression
Summary
Analysis
Mister Leeds, the owner of the talking head exhibit, is from the United States but speaks Spanish well, having toured Latin America extensively. He welcomes them to a private showing and offers to let them inspect his device before and after. The room is covered in black cloth and occult symbols, a table in the center. Ben Zayb looks under the table and the cloth but is unable to find the mirrors he expected. Mister Leeds begins, bringing in a foul-smelling wooden box. He explains that he found the box in an Egyptian pyramid and that it contains ashes and a piece of paper. The audience members, taken in by the atmosphere, are all on edge. Mister Leeds continues, explaining that he transformed the ashes into a human head by deciphering and pronouncing the words on the paper.
Mister Leeds’s Spanish fluency and past travels allude to the once-great extent of the Spanish empire, a territory that in the novel’s present only encompasses the Philippines, Cuba, part of Morocco, and a few islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. His exhibition is also exemplary of late 19th-century curiosities; advances in science, including excavations of the Pyramids, had created intense public interest around archaeology, but there was still a flourishing market for all kinds of carnival hoaxes. Mister Leeds skillfully plays on both science and magic to prepare his audience for the performance.
Themes
Mister Leeds places the box on the table, but before he opens it, Ben Zayb asks him to remove the tablecloth. Mister Leeds does so. He then pronounces the first word, and the box opens, revealing a human head. The head makes eye contact with a shaken Father Salví. Mister Leeds commands the head to speak, and it explains that it was an ancient Egyptian, persecuted by priests on false premises. The priests killed it during a pursuit on a lake and disgraced the woman it had loved. The head has now returned to reveal their treachery. Father Salví begs for mercy and collapses, and the head repeats its accusations of murder. Mister Leeds closes the head up again as the others rush to help the priest. Don Custodio insists the exhibit be banned, and the next day the captain-general orders the same, but Mister Leeds has already left for Hong Kong.
How the mechanism of Mister Leeds’s talking head works, or if it is indeed magic, is never revealed, but Ben Zayb is unable to expose it as he had hoped (in a deleted passage in the original manuscript, Rizal explains the clever mechanism behind the fake talking head and how it tricked Ben Zayb). The head’s story, however, is eerily familiar: besides its setting in ancient Egypt, it is identical to the story of Ibarra. This is not lost of Father Salví, the main instigator of Ibarra’s downfall, who is overcome with guilt and fear. Mister Leeds’s sudden disappearance suggests that he was perhaps working for Simoun all along—after all, the jeweler was the one who suggested they attend the fair, only to mysteriously disappear before seeing the talking head.
Themes
